Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Photos

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Incidently, I know the photos from my trip that I’m putting up right now look like crap – they’re the low-resolution JPEG versions of the RAW files that my camera generates, and I’m “editing” them in Picnik instead of photoshop.

Once I get home, I’ll start photoshopping pictures and replace them with half decent ones.

How much sushi can you make for $6?

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

How much sushi can you make at home for $6?

Answers:

  1. Far more than the two small pieces you’d get at a restaurant.
  2. Enough to fill a dinner plate.
  3. Pretty close to the limit that one person can eat in one sitting.
Homemade tuna sushi

Homemade tuna sushi

Cool toy of the day…

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

So where have I travelled?


Create your own visited map of The World

I like to think I’ve travelled a lot, but this really shows me how little of the world I’ve seen…

Castle Air Museum

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

On the way back from Yosemite, I took a detour to the Castle Air Museum, in Atwater, California. I rate this place as “very cool for airplane geeks who have read too many Dale Brown novels.” :)

I found out about the museum late one night, when I was playing “1980’s Soviet Spy,” which is a game I invented where you use Google Maps satellite photos to try and find U.S. warplanes on military bases. I wondered if there were still any SR-71’s operational anywhere I could look for, and some googling told me no, but there was one on display at this museum about 4 hours from my apartment.

They also had a B-52 there (hence the Dale Brown reference.) I knew from books that it was big, but I didn’t know it was thaaat big! The little white blob under the nose is some random tourist posing.

However, the aircraft I found myself most in awe of was one I’d never even heard of before: The Convair B-36 Peacemaker. It’s the largest piston-engine aircraft ever made, and its six propellers face backwards.

There are plenty of other pictures up on my Flickr Page.

Some vacation pics

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

I went on vacation to Yosemite for a few days last week.

On my first day there, I walked around a lake and saw a bird standing on some rocks, fishing. I thought “Wow, this is cool” and I went back to my car and got my camera, telephoto lens, and tripod.

When I got back, the bird was still there. So I set up and waited to try and get some good pictures.

After 20 minutes it flapped its wings…

Bird flaps wings.

After 55 minutes, it caught a fish, but my hand was away from the camera and I missed it. It was at this point that I thought “I think I’ll just put the camera away and enjoy my vacation.”

I didn’t pull the camera back out until I drove out of the park a few days later and visited Mono Lake. I’d heard it was an interesting place to take photos.

Mono Lake

It seems that back in the olden days, before Los Angeles started draining every body of water within a ten-zillion mile radius, there were underwater springs in Mono Lake. As they percolated water up, the calcium in the spring water formed underwater rock structures. And, as LA sucked all the water out of the lake, these tufta became visible.

Good for photographers, bad for the environment. Oh well.

There’s a few more photos on my flickr page, but not too many. It was too dang hot every day for me to want to haul around a camera and tripod.

Still to come: Photos from my side-trip to Castle Air Museum; there’s lots of those ;)